Warner: Russians Have Sown Chaos in America Without Firing a Shot
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Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), as Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is his party’s top figure investigating what he considers a critical Russian threat to the United States that has cost Moscow “peanuts.”
“We are here,” he said in a statement prepared for Thursday’s hearing with former FBI Director James Comey, “because a foreign adversary attacked us right here at home. Plain and simple. Not by guns or missiles, but by foreign operatives seeking to hijack our most important democratic process – our Presidential election. Russian spies engaged in a series of online cyber raids and a broad campaign of disinformation – all ultimately aimed at sowing chaos to undermine public faith in our process, in our leadership and in ourselves.”
This was a sweeping statement from someone who had no experience in intelligence when he came to the Senate in 2009. “I didn’t even know how many different intelligence agencies there were,” he told the Cipher Brief.
But most of the people who work in Washington’s Intelligence Community live in Virginia and are his constituents. In 2011, when he was offered a seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Warner’s predecessor, former Sen. John Warner (R) (no relation), and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) advised him to go for it.
“You can be the intel guy, but you can also be the local guy that represents them all,” the Virginia senator told The Cipher Brief. “It was some of the best advice I got, because even in years when, on other committee assignments up here, nothing gets done, the Intel Committee still gets, usually, an authorization bill done. You hear whatever’s current. It’s not like there’s not enough bad guys going around in the world, there’s always something interesting.”
Warner is proud that the committee’s work is “generally bipartisan.” Since he has been on the committee, Warner said, the number of 8 to 7 votes have been “less than one hand, so most of the votes are either unanimous or overwhelming bipartisan majorities.”
Another plus for serving on the committee, he said, has been the opportunity to delve into areas that were getting relatively little attention. Warner, who co-founded the telecommunications company that became Nextel, added value by delving into satellites and related intelligence subjects. He has been an advocate for moving away from big, government-owned satellites into what he calls “more agile collaboration with the commercial sector.”
“We still need the exquisite technical means,” he said, but not in “the same way we used to.”
For his panel’s probe into suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 electionm Warner said he has been impatient at many points, “but I’m pretty impatient with a lot of stuff, and doing it right’s more important than doing it quickly.”
He described the pace of the Senate investigation as logical.
“You have to go through all the documents,” he said, “and you have to reconfirm for anyone that would still have a question – which seems to be only the White House at this point – did the Russians try to intervene in our elections. And you get through that, and then you move to, well, did that intervention actually include some level of communication or even potentially collaboration with one of the campaigns?”
He said that the distraction of the Russia probe from the committee’s duty to perform other important intelligence oversight work is a “potential problem.” This is “where I‘ve got to give [Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman] Richard Burr [R-NC] credit,” Warner said, explaining that Burr “has “tried to say, no, we’re not going to be consumed by this, we’re going to still do our traditional business as well.”
He lauded the appointment of former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s Russia investigation after Trump fired Comey, but Warner cautioned that House and Senate probes need to continue.
The Mueller appointment, he said “is a necessary first step to ensure that the FBI is able to carry out a thorough, independent, and impartial investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and any potential coordination with the Trump campaign, as well as any attempt to interfere with that investigation.”
“It is also imperative,” he added, “that we in Congress continue to fulfill our obligation to get the facts out to the American people. The announcement of a special counsel should do absolutely nothing to slow the important progress we have made in following the intelligence wherever it leads.”
The Senate committee and the Justice Department have different purposes and standards, he said.
The committee, he said, is focusing on counterintelligence issues, while Mueller and his team will be “looking at behavior and determining whether it rises to a level of criminal activity.”
“There may be contacts that fall short of legal collusion, but which the American people still have a right to know,” Warner said. “Our goal is to conduct a bipartisan inquiry that gets the facts out to the American people about what happened in this election. In that respect, and in many ways, our purview is even broader than the Department of Justice-FBI investigation.”
Some have proposed the establishment of an independent commission. While Warner said he was not opposed to the idea, he does not see it as “a panacea.”
Membership of most independent commissions, he said, includes one-third of the members appointed by the President and one-third each for the House and Senate. If the commission were to have 15 members, and with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and a Republican president, he said, three out of the five appointees from each house would be Republicans.
“I don’t have a lot of faith that this President’s really going to appoint independent people,” Warner said. “You go from our committee, which is 8-7 Republican to Democrat, to a commission that could be, technically, 11-4. I’d rather take my chances with this Intel Committee, which has the faith of the Intelligence Community, and where there’s a fair balance and a tradition of bipartisanship, than rolling the dice that somehow things are going to be perfect, and you’re going to create this magical, mythical independent commission that’s going to have only true independent patriots on it.”
He said most of the people who complain to him call for an independent commission, a position he described as the “mainstream, kind of Democratic, position at this point.”
“I’m not opposed to that, but I think that people haven’t thought through all the steps that it would take,” he said.
Warner said he is “still more optimistic than not” that the Senate investigation will come up with a bipartisan product, “which I think is the most important thing.”
He said with the country divided on support for Trump, “if we don’t have a product that at least, say, 75 percent of the American public can say, hey, these guys were straight up, whatever their conclusion is, I’m going to feel disappointed that we haven’t done our job.”
Warner said he did not think there is anything that he’s done in public life that is more important than this probe.
“People really worry, and I worry, about our democracy at this point,” he said. “Here’s something, without firing a shot, that [the Russians] have been as strategically effective as anything I’ve seen in all my lifetime, of sowing chaos in America and lack of faith in our democratic institutions,” he said. “They have not fired a shot. And they have spent peanuts on it.”
Regardless of what the Trump Administration or campaign turns out to have done, he said, “this whole question about how easily manipulable our information intake is really scares the dickens out of me.”
Steve Hirsch is a senior national security editor at The Cipher Brief.